Buildium Reviews

*Ease of use cannot be overstated
*Screen aren't overly "busy" and the fonts are easily read, layout is obvious
*Accuracy and flexibility to make all accounting coherent and easy to explain to brokers/owners
*Reports generate quickly and while viewable on the screen can zero in on specific transactions, with interactive links
*Ability to email individual reports or export in a variety of printing styles
*Bank reconciliation and tie-out cash to properties and owners and company is simple
*Communications have improved a lot in the past year - SMS tracking communication with tenants is much better.
* banking window is AWESOME Being able to select by property and dates... Wonderful!!

*Reporting fails - prints two pages when unnecessary, waste of paper, most people want one pagers
- inability to email all owners their statements to each owner all at once. Can email individual reports only. Can't select properties on the fly- have to create a printing Group first.
*Email addresses in owner and tenant records still tried to jump outside of Buildium instead of taking you to a simplified email interface within for tracked communications.
Sometimes it's a little clunky navigating back and forth to common areas like between lease and property
*Inability to produce a Invoice to the owner for reimbursing the broker/property manager or other vendors as needed. Owner statement doesn't reflect bills for the property entered but not yet paid.

Nothing really.

Lack of customer service. Armature accounting and reports. Unwillingness to listen to their clients. Horrendous file management system. Not for HOA management .

Love the Tenant Portal and all the features it offers. Accounting functions are easy to use and there is a simple way to make any type of entry.

Would be very helpful is there was a report to track both Liability & Worker Comp insurance for Vendors & Certificates Of Liability for Commercial Tenants. As well as Property Taxes & Insurance on all Properties.

Ease of use. Tech support available by phone.

User training options at the start of use. Perhaps online classes could be considered?

This app is wonderful and really helps keep the tenants, leases, contact info, maintenance requests, leasing and listing, Property Management, Work Orders, finances everything to do with Property Management all in order. It’s a great way to keep your company organized.

I wish that there was a feature that we could have the list of tenants, like with outstanding balances, and when leases are close to being up etc. There’s a process, and I wish I could have a list of tenants with the check mark boxes beside them to mark off and keep track of each process. And even when I leave the page, and go else where in Buildium. When I come back to the list it is still the same as when I left it and I don’t have to start over. Just so I can keep track of which task and property I’ve already done for said task. For example: We have leases ending soon, I have to email each owner of each property to see if they want to do a rent increase or move out. This is where I would need my first check list of tenants I need to do this for. Then the next step is to create said rent increase notices or move out notices , this would be the second check list of tenants so that I can mark off and keep track of each step of the process and which tenants I’ve already completed the rent increase notices/move out notices for. I need this to be able to make separate lists that save even when I leave the page and go else where in Buildium. Right now there is a check box by each tenant, but it’s not really designed to keep track of what your doing because when I leave the page and come back my check marks are gone and I have to start over and try to remember which tenants I’ve already completed the process before. When dealing with tons of tenants this would make my job easier

I like most it is user friendly but when I have an issue I can get online or telephone contact help. They are knowledgeable answer my questions and get me going.

I wanted to have two separate budgets with separate chart of accounts and was told not available. I have to download in excel and do some extra steps

Buildiun is a very easy to use software. New features are normally well received by my staff.

Missing some features. 3rd Party (FORTE) is not customer friendly.

I like the ease of use, little training is needed to make full use of the system.

The owner portal isn't as easy to use as expected.

easy to setup/use
It cuts my job in half
always adding more features
online portal

I went from using quickbooks to buildium. The products are night and day. Buildium definetly offers way more. The only issue I have is with the accounting side. I wish it had the capability to track expenses by apartment so I could keep track of renovation costs. You can't customize the reports as much as I would like. QuickBooks had a great feature so you could track and reconcile your loan payments.

Easy to use and can cope with multiple properties.
Reports can be generated for variations in financial year reporting of different counties.
You can set up recurring bills so they appear on your list of things to do which reminds you and you don't have to re-enter all the data each time you have a bill to pay.

This is an American based program and for American users, it offers the ability to pay bills direct from your bank account etc. For me in Australia, this facility is unavailable.

As an accountant, the accounting features are awesome. Online payments make tracking incoming rents easier since there is less leg work. You can setup priorities on how payments are applied. The program is easy to use and to navigate. Buildium provides tutorials that are great training tools for new and even experienced users. Buildium was easy to setup and integrate into our company.

I have yet to find any complaints with Buildium's program. There are continuing to improve and add features on a quarterly basis. There were no issues switching to this software from our previous system.

I have been in the Property Management field for over 30 years and started with a DOS based accounting program for our rentals. When it became too outdated to use anymore, my Broker dragged me, kicking and screaming, into the new age of online property management programs. After trying a few of them and being terribly discouraged and disappointed, I found Buildium and have not looked back since. The accounting features allow me to give my Landlords exact and professional reports and access to their account information through the portal. Nearly ALL of my tenants are paying online now, which is a great time saver and perfect for my small business situation. I am able to track every penny, every vacancy, every lease renewal AND I have it linked to my website so all it takes to put a property on the market is the click of a button. But the very best part about Buildium is their customer service!!! I have tried to figure out problems for HOURS on my own, then given up and called customer service to have an answer within minutes!!! It is amazing how fantastic the staff is. And the program keeps getting new features and fine tuning too. They listen to their customers and their excellent developers respond to our needs quickly. I've never had a better experience with ANY program or company, across the board. Highly recommend them.

The ONLY complaint I have about Buildium is that my ESCROW account balances, which are the tenant's money being held in trust, only show the Property Owner names on my reports.

I had used the software at another company and thought it would work well at my current job. I really appreciated the customer service from my past experience. I have had only one less than favorable experience with the customer service received in my years of using Buildium. I like how easy it is for our tenants to use and navigate. It has encouraged most of them to pay online which is a huge time saver for me.

Since we do commercial leasing and not residential, there are some misses in my opinion. I'd say my biggest frustration with the software is the eleasing formatting. If you have a document with tagged information boxes, if you enter in one wrong piece of information instead of being able to edit just that one box, you have to cancel the whole document and start over. That's rather a pain. So I've been uploading forms more instead of using the saved elease documents for this reason. Also, I wish there was a way to tailor the communications better. My tenants want to receive monthly rent invoice yet your system only generates monthly statements. So I have to manually make these monthly, which is time consuming. It would be nice if I could create something like this. I worked with several customer service reps on this tasks and it was decided that what I want done is not possible at this time.

All in all, this software works great, and is very stable. The process flow is intuitive and simple, but as with every software, has it own unique quirks. Once you get the process flow down, it does pretty much everything you could want a property rental software to do. This software is more directed at either individual landlords, or property rental companies who rent other people's property. If you're a company who self-owns a group of properties, just know functionally the software works great, but some of the reporting options and budget options won't fit that business model exactly.
The functionality is there, and it works well. Incoming payment processing, and the automatic tracking of it works really well, and the multiple payment options are great for my customers.
Moving from a traditional quickbooks-style accounting software to the online system, has been great. The functionality to log-in from anywhere (including mobile) to access the system is a huge improvement, and allowing multiple users to log-in at the same time is great. A bunch of the manual entry and accounting minutia that I experienced before has been removed from my plate.

From my customer's perspective, there are two main short comings of the software package. The first is the mobile app -- I'm told its slow and clunky to use. The general consensus of my customers is the web portal is superior and much easier to use. The second is the length of time a financial transaction takes. The transaction time for a credit card payment is typically end of day or next business day (not an instant charge), and an ACH is typically 2 business days to pull (so a customer can initiate the payment Friday, but not have money removed from their account until Tuesday.)

From the business/accounting side, while all the data is there in Buildium, you can't do much easily with that data. The reporting side is very limited. While there are roughly about 20 reports built into Buildium, they are limited. There are the obvious Balance Sheet, P&L, Delinquent Customers, etc. reports -- it's pretty much limited to those built in reports. Getting data out of Buildium to play with in Excel is difficult, and the lack of reporting options can be disappointing.

As stated before, the reporting and budgeting options in this software lends itself well to looking at houses at an individual level, but if you're a company who self-owns many properties - you won't be able to budget along the traditional company level -- all budgets are locked to specific houses.

Money Transfer Times - money transfer is moderatel slow - 2-3 days for Credit/ACH, 5 bus days for Retail

There are several items within Buildium that by far surpassed other property management companies. The ability to upload subcontractor paperwork and have all the information in one place securely online with reminders set up when expirations or missing information is needed. The ability for everyone with accounts set up to communicate, check on tasks, and proposals all in one place for easy referral. One of the easiest implementations and setups for property management software. But the absolute best thing about Buildium for me anyways is that you can list as much information from sales, tasks, proposals, selections, etc. I truly believe that all companies need to keep as much information as possible on file and with Buildium you can put as much information as you need, place tags for easy reporting, and this information is for authorized users to see. To me, you can never have too much information and it makes is so much easier if you have a person leave and the new hire to move it and look at the information to be brought up to date.

When I first started working with Buildium I wished that there had been a step by step workflow check sheet because at times I had to go and research if I was entering the data correctly. But that was quickly solved while speaking with Buidium's excellent customer support team members.
Finally, I would recommend a Buildium forum where all users can go on and if they have questions can post it to the forum as another user may have had the same problem.

Buildium has been great for our resident managed HOA. We did a thorough vetting job in choosing our management software, and it has lived up to what we hoped for. The books are right there, and we can allow anyone to see all that is going on at any time. Board members and volunteers have different levels of access, and that has made it easy for reporting. Resident portals are great, and the communication is easy.

Size of documents/invoices you can is smaller than needed, so I often have to split documents into parts which is annoying. The email took doesn't allow cut and paste of a pdf into the body of text. I always have to send our newsletter as an attachment. Sometimes q & a does not answer my questions for simple things -- such as, I misspelled the name of a new owner, and it took me 30 minutes to figure out how to correct, because there was no answer provided in q & a. My biggest "complaint" would be that this is rental focused in some regard, and we have no tenants. We only have owners, and residents sometimes tell us they are confused by the things that say "tenants" or refer to rentals.

When you call support you do not have to wait on hold, they will call you back.
Reporting is very nice.
The system actually works.
Price is fair.

Release communication: When the release breaks something and the accounts get messed up (like they did a upgrade for lease renewals that had a bug where the leases did not renew with the correct rent amount), the communication is horrible and they fix the problem going forward but not the messed up accounts.
Phone support is lacking. When the error cannot be resolved immediately (by telling me what i did wrong), they rarely if ever follow up on the ticket. I don't know how they monitor their open tickets. One fellow did not even create a ticket, so after 1 week of waiting I called back to find out I had to start over. Then I waited another week and called back for a status, and there was no status -- still waiting 2 weeks in. When they have a problem to investigate, they do very poorly.
Lastly, if you accept ACH or credit/ debit card payments and any item is disputed. the only way to communicate with them is via email. They will not verbally tell you anything. You initially get 7 days to provide evidence of a valid charge. After that the dispute remains on your account until it is re-credited to you account or nothing happens, and I mean nothing. In this case your evidence doesnt matter the charge back stands, Buildium doesn't notify you at all. They tell you it can take 4 months for a response and during that time the only way you know if it is settled is to EMAIL them.

I like the fact you can attach documents to just about every transaction, property, lease, tenant, and so fourth. I wish you could attach multiple documents to each. I like the automatic banking and online payment option. It reduces the time I have to make entries manually. I like the syndication option and wish it would push to even more websites. I like the tenant portal and the ability for tenants to log maintenance requests. I like the communication function. It allows easy documentation of all of my communication between me and my tenant. Basically all the features that allow automation and give me the ability to minimize my time managing the properties.

I don't like the fact that if a payment is rejected the software doesn't automatically go back and apply the late fee base on the rules setup. I don't like that some transactions can only have one attachment. I don't like the fact that you can't setup recurring general ledger transactions. I don't like the fact that you can't text multiple numbers at once. I absolutely hate the format of the excel reports. It would be great if the reports could combine both properties and company as well.

It was a good product when I began using it 2 years ago.

Online payment system fails frequently
Poor customer support
Unethical (Had to move to Appfolio because of Buildium's recurrently broken online payment system was causing financial loses. They still refuse to refund my subscription payment)